[ecrea] CFP: Collectivity: Camera Obscura 40th anniversary special issue

CAMERA OBSCURA: FEMINISM, CULTURE, AND MEDIA STUDIES

Call for Submissions:
Collectivity


For the fortieth anniversary of /Camera Obscura/, we invite submissions 
on the theme of collectivity.

Collectives often emerge in periods of crisis in response to new social, 
economic, and technological conditions. /Camera Obscura/’s feminist 
editorial collective has functioned in this way since its beginnings in 
the 1970s, a time when many forms of cooperative action proliferated. In 
this period, collectives formed around issues of gender, race, and 
politics, with many organizing around forms of media production. In the 
last ten to fifteen years, a growing constellation of collectives, many 
international, has emerged, configuring artists and activists in new 
political and cultural formations. These collectives are a response to 
developments like the growing impact of digital media and mobile 
technologies, new paradigms of relational aesthetics, new configurations 
of labor and precarity, and the rise of neoliberal policy, which has 
worked to erode the public sphere and shared resources in favor of the 
idea of individual responsibility. In contrast, the theory and practice 
of collectivity emphasize participation, consensus, and working toward 
common goals. However, as anyone who has been part of a collective 
knows, these formations are never free of difficulty and 
disagreement—difficulties that relate to issues of communication as well 
as to the very dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, race, and 
multinationalism that demand collective responses.


Topics might include, but are not limited to:

 Conceptualizing “collectivity,” “cooperation,” and “commons”

Historically specific investigations of past and still-functioning 
collectives

The affective economies of collectivity

The analysis of films, videos, or other media objects produced through 
collective action or participation

The cultural, discursive, and economic structures that underlie and 
produce collectivity

Collectivity and forms of labor and media

The temporality of collectivity

Collectivity and utopianism

The relationship of technological change to collectivity

The relation of collectivity to identity, individuality, and subjectivity

Transnational forms of collectivity

Collaboration, microtopias, communities of practice, and the space of 
the commons

Swarms, multitudes, and political uprising

Specific dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, and class in collective 
formations


We welcome both essay-length submissions and shorter writings 
appropriate to our “In Practice” section. Please visit 
http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/ for our complete submission 
guidelines. Submissions and queries should be sent to 
(cameraobscura /at/ filmandmedia.ucsb.edu) 
<mailto:(cameraobscura /at/ filmandmedia.ucsb.edu)>. The deadline for 
submissions is 15 October 2014.

--
Athena Tan
Managing Editor, CAMERA OBSCURA: FEMINISM, CULTURE, AND MEDIA STUDIES
Ph.D. Candidate, Film and Media Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara